• Tom Lane's avatar
    Add documentation and tests for quote marks in ECPG literal queries. · c16a1bbc
    Tom Lane authored
    ECPG's PREPARE ... FROM and EXECUTE IMMEDIATE can optionally take
    the target query as a simple literal, rather than the more usual
    string-variable reference.  This was previously documented as
    being a C string literal, but that's a lie in one critical respect:
    you can't write a data double quote as \" in such literals.  That's
    because the lexer is in SQL mode at this point, so it'll parse
    double-quoted strings as SQL identifiers, within which backslash
    is not special, so \" ends the literal.
    
    I looked into making this work as documented, but getting the lexer
    to switch behaviors at just the right point is somewhere between
    very difficult and impossible.  It's not really worth the trouble,
    because these cases are next to useless: if you have a fixed SQL
    statement to execute or prepare, you might as well write it as
    a direct EXEC SQL, saving the messiness of converting it into
    a string literal and gaining the opportunity for compile-time
    SQL syntax checking.
    
    Instead, let's just document (and test) the workaround of writing
    a double quote as an octal escape (\042) in such cases.
    
    There's no code behavioral change here, so in principle this could
    be back-patched, but it's such a niche case I doubt it's worth
    the trouble.
    
    Per report from 1250kv.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/673825.1603223178@sss.pgh.pa.us
    c16a1bbc
sql-execute.stderr 9.59 KB